Cardio is boring, takes too long, doesn't work very well,
and can lead to overuse injuries (just ask all the
overweight joggers at the doctor's office having their sore
knees looked after).
Long, slow to moderate intensity cardio training, which is
what you see most people still doing in the gym, is not
really the best way to shed fat.
Interval training, which is periods of short hard exercise
followed by short periods of recovery, works better for fat
loss, according to both Canadian and Australian researchers
(plus hundreds of advanced trainers throughout the world).
An interval might last 30 seconds to 60 seconds, and it
would be hard work, harder than normal cardio. Each work
interval is followed by 30 to 90 seconds of very easy pace.
So if you're running on a treadmill you might run at 7 mph
for your work interval and then go all the way down to 3
mph for a walk for your rest.
That's what we use instead of slow cardio. All it takes is
20 minutes of interval training to get better results than
40 or 60 minutes of slow cardio.
Now the research and experience is showing that the
intervals not only as effective, but it's even more
effective in most cases. And also you're doing fewer
repetitions. So, you know, every time you run we'll count
that as repetitions, so if you run for 60 minutes you're
looking at maybe 3,000, 4,000 repetitions in a slow cardio
workout where you're doing probably one-third of that or
even one-fifth of that in interval workout.
And that leads to less overuse injuries and that's one of
the big problems with long slow cardio is that a lot of
people end up in the physiotherapy office getting some type
of therapy for their overuse injuries. Runners are in there
all the time getting their injuries looked after.
So, we're trying to cut back on the volume of work, cutting
back on the quantity and focusing on the quality. And like
I said, we started off just by doing it to save time and
now we're also finding out that we're actually getting more
results.
And there's so many different things that you can do for
interval training. It doesn't just have to be running on a
treadmill. Clients have started to incorporate a lot of
jump rope intervals, which jump rope can be very intense,
so I think that's a great, you know, just think of ways
that you can make things fun and things that you may enjoy
doing.
You might not enjoy running, so find something that you do
enjoy doing like jump roping or maybe getting on a
stationary bike, but do it, make it real intense for a
shorter period of time, then back up that intensity and do
a interval type workout and I think you're going to have
fun doing it.
To me it's more fun than walking for an hour on a treadmill
and you're going to get more benefit out of it and it's
going to take a less amount of time. Less amount of
workout time, better results, and more fun.
You're looking at probably at least a dozen different ways
you can do interval training. Even if you played squash
that would be better than you going and doing a long, slow
cardio because most sports are interval training in their
nature so you're going to get a better benefit of that.
And again that's more fun.
You can also do biking or rowing. There's all types of
traditional cardio machine that can be used.
We also use sometimes kettlebells and we also use body
weight circuits, which are not really interval training but
they're not strength training and they're definitely not
cardio, but we find that body weight circuits are
beneficial in a whole bunch of different ways.
They like interval training to help burn calories and lose
body fat, but also because most people are doing exactly
what we're doing right now, which is sitting in a chair all
day, they're either driving or they're at work and they're
in that one posture. Then they get in an elliptical
machine and it's not much different.
But if we switch that elliptical machine for body weight
circuits where we're doing all different types of movements
and three dimensions and working the upper back and also
working mobility, that stuff is so much better for the body
than going on any cardio machine and just doing the same
motion over and over again.
So there's a whole lot to be said for the body weight
circuit training. You can definitely find some of my
circuit training videos on YouTube, will give you lots of
ideas, but basically what we do there is we generally will
take an upper body exercise and a lower body exercise or a
whole bunch of them and we'll alternate between upper and
lower. Maybe we'll do six or eight exercises in a circuit,
take a minute rest, and then go through that again.
Twenty minutes of that, it goes by a lot faster. Interval
training goes by a lot faster than regular cardio. And
body weight circuits go by just as fast as interval
training. So, if somebody doesn't like the gym and just
wants to get out in a very short amount of time without a
lot of mental pain, then doing this type of training is
going to help you enjoy your workouts more and spend less
time in the gym.
So what we're really trying to do is show people that
there's so many other options to getting a better body than
what they've read in the muscle magazines or Shape Magazine
for the last 20 years since the 1980s that you have to do
an hour of circuit training with machines and then an hour
on the cardio machine.
That's not a great way to live life and it's not the best
way to get results, especially when you look at the body in
terms of everything from not only how it looks but also how
it moves with the mobility.
And these days were just so immobile in our daily lives
that we need to get more movement patterns into our
training sessions. And again it's more variety and a lot
more fun.
So drop the slow cardio and do some type of fat burning
interval training to lose belly fat.
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Learn more about interval training and the dark side of
cardio in the free report from
http://www.turbulencetraining.com
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